Crowd-funding meets open-source Something makes me deeply uncomfortable about Yehuda Katz's (@wycats) recently announced crowd-funding effort for rails.app, and I have been trying to put my finger on it. To a certain extent, writing anything on the subject is a moot point. As of 2nd April, the target of $25,000 has been far exceeded. There is clearly interest (and money) in our industry for such a tool. Nevertheless, I think Eric Hodel is conflating points in his latest blog post "On Community Funding of Open Source". Over the last week, there have been those that have expressed their dissatisfaction with...

In so many ways, Bundler is a godsend. Yet, like all gems (forgive the wordplay), it is not without a few rough edges. While at the (absolutely fantastic) Wroclaw.rb last weekend, I finally took a moment to round up some of these issues into a lightning talk. Unfortunately, not having paced myself correctly I got cut off just before the final couple of slides. So I resolved to reformulate the content into a blog post. A further impetus was a recent gist by Sven Fuchs (der Travis CI- und Ruby I18n-Meister). The aim of this article is to highlight a...

The Web Dingus for MarkdownJ is back and deployed to Google App Engine. This is the first "application" I've deployed to GAE (I use inverted commas, as it is a pretty trivial application). The experience was relatively straightforward, although one issue I did encounter was that GAE's customised version of Jetty does not handle <jsp-file>-type servlets correctly (see issue 1365). A simple workaround was to rename the jsp file I wanted to map as a servlet to index.jsp. My next step will be improving documentation and publishing the API docs somewhere. The MarkdownJ site is currently hosted on GitHub pages....

Underneath DataMapper (at least if you haven't bitten the NoSQL bullet just yet) lies DataObjects. DataObjects is an attempt to rewrite existing Ruby database drivers to conform to one, standard interface. If you're a recent arrival from the world of PHP or .Net, then the DO API will not look too disimilar to either PDO or ADO.net. Late this spring, tucked away in the DataObjects' Release Notes for version 0.9.12, was mention of support for JRuby. Unfortunately the support that featured in 0.9.12 was incomplete at best. We needed a little longer to get things working well, but over the...

Thanks to GitHub's API, there are definite possibilities for integrating Trac with GitHub. However, for right now the simplest way is to just provide a link. Thanks to customizable navigation introduced in Trac 0.11, this should now be really simple. If you're using the web Administration screen, click through to Manage Plugins and from there, ensure trac.versioncontrol.web_ui.* modules are deselected, with the exception of the BrowserModule ( trac.versioncontrol.web_ui.browser). You can also enable/disable the appropriate plugins by editing your trac.ini file. Then you'll need to remap the browser module link to GitHub. This time, this must be done by directly editing...

Welcome to my new Portfolio site - mon book en ligne. I have been meaning to get this site up for quite some time, but I resolved to get something up, so here it is. I'll be working on it bit-by-bit, but there have been a few false starts. An original version of this message appeared on a WordPress-powered blog a few weeks ago, but I have since moved over the the Apache Roller weblog software. I'll explain why I did sometime soon. This is not the extent of this site. There is an awesome Ruby-on-Rails-powered application that I'll be...